This book presents the refereed proceedings of the 7th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA'95, held in Funchal, Madeira Island, Portugal, in October 1995.
The 30 revised full papers and the 15 poster presentations included were selected during a highly competitive selection process from a total of 167 submissions from all over the world. Among the topics covered are automated reasoning and theorem proving, belief revision, constraint-based reasoning, distributed artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms, machine learning, neural networks, non-monotonic reasoning, planning and case-based reasoning, qualitative reasoning, robotics and control, and theory of computation.

The paradigm of manufacturing is undergoing a major evolution throughout the world. The use of computers, the Internet and new challenges related to the Industry 4.0 have changed the way we engineer and manufacture products. Improving production with Lean Thinking is an evolution of a traditional approach in order to improve its processes to remain competitive in the global market. Lean Manufacturing is a multidimensional approach that embraces a wide variety of management practices in a unified system. These practices contain, quality systems, team work, and supplier management, among others. Nowadays, other practices have been adopted such as human factors and ergonomics. This book presents contributions of Lean Manufacturing applications in the world development and is intended to provide a comprehensive view of issues related to this area, with a specific focus on lean engineering principles; it is full of practical production examples of how Lean Thinking can be applied effectively to production systems. This work was conceptualized for an audience of graduate students mainly; however, it can also be consulted by engineers and company managers who seek state-of-the-art applications on Lean Manufacturing within a wide diversity of scenarios and conditions. The book, organized into 17 chapters, is intended to be an excellent source for dissemination of applied researches, lean concepts, and practices that have been successfully applied in the developing world domain. The book is also an excellent example of academy purpose with collaboration between different institutions from different countries that provide a global approach. Maria JoAGBPo Viamonte, PhD ISEP's President